Elderflowers

A Recollection of the “House of Life”

by Wilhelm Raabe

Table of Contents part 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6

part 2

I had been flung out into the world to fend for myself quite early on in life and had lived as an orphan, heir to a not inconsiderable fortune, in the house of a relative who was also a bilious hypochondriac carrying morbid thoughts of death even into the most cheerful of days and binding me with iron fetters to my daily chores and then to unremitting study.

Discontented and recalcitrant, I would sit in a darkened room while my childhood, which contains the happiest days of your life under normal circumstances, passed by wretchedly and inauspiciously enough under the watchful gaze of those surly eyes. The unbridled pleasure and the heady exaltation to be found in a circle of carefree companions were unknown to me then. I never once got a thrashing for a silly puerile prank, and that an incalculable blessing was denied me in this way, which no grammatical treat could ever take the place of, is something that more than one well-educated gentleman can testify to.

There was much that was fascinating and exotic in many of the books over which I had to pore all day long, but even the most splendid and dazzling of gods and goddesses came over to me as no better than grisly torturers, and ancient heroes and philosophers appeared to me to fight their battles and impart their wisdom only as a way for them to vent on me their arbitrary spleen, poor prisoner that I was. They had lived their lives and carried out their exploits only to drag me, thousands of years later, through terrifying labyrinths full of monstrous vocabulary and to push me over gloomy precipices bristling with the brambles of complex grammatical constructions.

* * *

When this seven-year apprenticeship to misery had finally finished, I naturally broke loose like a wild animal from its chain, and the first and hitherto imponderable consequences of such an upbringing came to the fore. I belonged at university to the wildest and the most anarchic of its confraternities, and my standing in the eyes of my dignified tutors was appreciably less than it was in the eyes of my distinctly undignified cronies.

I naturally got as far away as possible from the area in which my guardian and relative lived and embarked on my academic career in Vienna, which was still, in those days, Mozart’s Vienna of “wine, women and song.” And when the ground beneath my feet had grown too hot for me there, and too many eyes were taking too much notice of what I was doing, I went to Prague, a city world-famous for its schools of medicine.

The sun was dancing still over the ballroom favour in my hand and the solitary hair, which its beautiful wearer had left behind between the white and now reddish blossoms, glowed like a thread of spun gold. I remembered the old city of Prague with its one hundred towers and another fair maiden whose hair, though, had been black, and I remembered other elderflowers. Prague! A town of lunacy and gaiety! A town of martyrs and musicians and beautiful women! Prague! How much of my freedom-loving soul you have taken away from me!

They say that when a Czech mother has given birth to a child, she lays it on the roof: if it stays there, it is destined to become a thief; if it rolls off, it is destined to be a musician. If the foregoing aphorism had come out of a German head, Bohemians would probably have had a lot to say about it but, as it is a pan-Slavic dictum, we must take it as it is, at face value.

In the old and fabulous city of Prague, when I was studying medicine there, such a child existed, the offspring of a Bohemian mother who was also Jewish. It had failed to fall off the roof, having indeed anchored itself thereto and was therefore fated to become a thief. It stole my heart, and yet I did not love it, and the story that grew out of all this was a sad one.

Then it was, if anything, even more difficult than today to find Prague’s famous Jewish cemetery if you were a stranger in the town. One simply did, and still does, the best one can to find the place, and so I, too, the day after my first arrival in Prague, asked the way there, having just, coming from the Grosser Ring, gone down Ghost Lane, at which point I had got lost in the nameless confusion of little streets and alleyways that together surround “the good place.”

As it is a matter of principle with me to turn to the most pleasant face I can find in any quandary caused by unfamiliar surroundings to help me, this was what I did now, but I fell from one difficulty straight into another: the people I met were all, without exception, as ugly as sin. Had I been willing to turn to the most repulsive face among them, I might have succeeded in arriving at my destination sooner. Eventually, however, I saw what I was looking for.

On a washing line strung up in front of a shadowy doorway hung an old frock and a not-ungracious fifteen-year old girl was nonchalantly leaning against the door jamb. She kept her hands and her arms hidden behind her back and looked at me. I looked back at her and decided to put my question. Hers was not the kind of face well-to-do people have and, before I received a response, a small brown hand came out from behind the child’s back and was thrust towards me with unmistakable intent, and there was nothing left for me to do but to deposit there a six-kreuzer piece.

“Our old graveyard, you say. Why, I’ll take you there myself, sir.”

Her wiry form sprang forthwith down three dirty steps, sailed past me without even turning round and started to lead me in a veritable zigzag through the most abominable nooks and crannies, back streets and alleyways in which offers came from all directions with a view to purchasing my old black German velvet frock-coat. I did not even stop to turn these offers down but concentrated all my attention on the dainty jack-o’lantern who was acting as my guide in these uncanny regions and who, playfully enjoying my discomfiture as she did so, was leading me astray.

We came at last into a narrow dead-end and turned off to the right between two high stone walls at the end of which a curious round arched door led to an equally curious dark passageway. My light-footed guide came to a halt outside this entrance, pointed to the darkness that prevailed there and said with an apparent candour that really took the biscuit: “Just knock on that door down there.”

Although I did not have the slightest inkling of where it was I ought to knock, I groped my way along the passage more by good luck than good management till I finally stumbled on a darkened door. I knocked on it, hearing moans and groans and then a shuffling sound coming from inside. Then the door opened and I stood there rooted to the spot in terror by an unsavoury old witch screeching at me in Czech.

Three more of these sorceresses were creeping up on me on crutches and they, too, were snarling something unintelligible at me. Totally taken aback, I gazed about me in the semi-darkness of the long low room. There were six beds there and, in two of them, two terrible spectres were sitting up and staring at me like the unfortunate creatures that Gulliver encountered on his travels, those beings who were born with a black spot on their forehead and who were incapable of dying.

I had the temerity to repeat my question about the Jewish cemetery even though my own misgivings warned me I had let myself be led here by the nose and that the question itself was quite inadmissible under the circumstances. I found myself, a moment later, back again in the sinister dark passage already depicted, happy to have gained my freedom without having had my eyes scratched out.

Inside the room there was pandemonium. The urchin, my will-of-the-wisp, my precious Jewish sweetheart, had led me for my half-a-dozen kreuzers to a charitable hospice for six old Christian ladies instead of to the venerable Israelite to whom the key to Beth Chaim had been entrusted.

A sound of high-pitched laughter roused me from my vexed and disconcerted state. Outside in the alleyway the sun was shining and, in the sunshine at the end of the dark passage, another witch was dancing and “dere iss no creadure vairer dan a vitch van she is younk beink.”

She danced in the sunshine and pulled a long face at me and I shook my fist at her threateningly: “Just you wait, you witch, you temptress, you little female devil from Prague, you!” She, however, pointed with her finger at her mouth and called out mockingly: “Strc prst skrz krk!” These lilting syllables, noticeable for the richness of their consonant clusters, roughly translated mean something like: “Go and stick your finger down your throat!”

Then the goblin disappeared, and I was free to reflect on the underlying meaning of her words to my heart’s content. But I chose not to and, after such an untoward experience, I decided not to ask anyone else the way to the old Jewish cemetery, but began, with Germanic thoroughness, to look for it myself. I trusted to my own lights, and they did not leave me in the lurch but brought me, in the end, by way of the dirtiest labyrinth of buildings that the human mind can imagine, to the gate that led to that awesome, oft-described domain of a thousand years of dust.

I saw there the countless tombstones piled up on top of one another and the ancient elder trees that twist and spread their gnarled old branches round and over them. I wandered down the narrow graveyard paths and saw the jugs of Levi and the hands of Cohen and the grapes of Canaan. As a mark of respect I laid, like everyone else, a small stone on the grave of the Chief Rabbi, Judah Loew ben Bezalel. Then I sat down on a grimy gravestone dating from the fourteenth century, and the uncanny nature of the place impressed itself upon me with considerable force.

For a thousand years, the dead of God’s chosen people had been gathered here together, hemmed in in the same way that the living had been by the narrow walls of the ghetto. The sun shone brightly, and it was spring and, from time to time, a cool gust of wind stirred the branches and the blossoms of the elder trees so that they brushed against the graves and filled the air with a sweet fragrance. I, on the other hand, was finding it more and more difficult to breathe. Was this really the place they called Beth Chaim, the House of Life?

From that black, damp, mouldy earth which had swallowed whole so many sorely-tried, ill-treated, put-upon and harassed generations of living beings and into which life after life had sunk as into a bottomless, all-consuming swamp, from that mildewed ground, I say, rose a pungent aroma of decomposition more suffocating than the stench that emanates from the unburied carcass of a beached whale, sufficiently funereal as an odour to cancel out completely all the sunlight and the pleasant scents exuded by both flowers and spring breezes.

I have already mentioned that I was, at that time in my life, something of a hell-raiser. The feeling, however, I was gripped by at that moment was adequate proof, even to me, of a latent, as yet underlying seriousness in my character.

* * *

My head was lolling further and further down on my chest when, suddenly, right next to me, on top of me, I heard the sound of childish, high-pitched laughter already familiar to me from my having heard it once before. This time I was startled and, looking up quickly, caught a fleeting glimpse of a delightful female form.

In the foliage of one of the low elder-bushes which, as has already been pointed out, covered the whole of the graveyard, in amongst the flowers themselves, on one of those fantastically gnarled branches which the spring, in its splendour and its glory, had crowned so abundantly with greenery and blossoms, sat the practical joker who had made such a bad job of showing me the way here, smiling roguishly down at her adopted German student.

No sooner had I stretched out my hand to catch this spook than, quick as a flash, it disappeared, and I saw in the next instant a laughing nut-brown face, framed by jet-black locks, near the grave of the Chief Rabbi as if she wanted to entice me after her again, tempting me this time to chase her over the old burial ground.

But this time I did not permit myself to be led astray, for I already knew full well that it would do me no good to run after her. She would only have vanished into the ground, down into that black earth, or, what was perhaps even more likely, have disappeared into the elder trees sheltering the graves. I continued to stand there stock-still and took not the least bit of comfort from the fact that it was broad daylight and high noon, for who could say but that this haunted place might be subject to supernatural laws quite different from the natural laws that operated elsewhere.

I stood there and was very careful not to move and, when the imp saw that her laughter and come-hither gestures were no longer helping her, this little enchantress of mine changed her tack. Her young face grew serious and, jumping down gracefully from her branch, she bowed politely to me and then, planting herself squarely in front of me, bowed again, saying: “Forgive me, handsome sir. I shan’t do you any more mischief now.”

She tolerated my taking her by the hand and did not try to prevent me from pulling her nearer so that I could look her straight in the eye. She even, to my amazement, gave a clear and sensible account of herself when I asked her where she came from and what she was called.

Unless she was lying like a leprechaun, this neglected and yet utterly charming being did not entirely inhabit the ethereal realm of Make-Believe and was not a daughter of Oberon and Titania but the progeny instead of very down-to-earth parents who were dealers in old clothes and general household requisites in the Josephstown area of Prague. I also learned the number of the house where she lived and her name, Jemimah, like the daughter of Job, that splendid fellow who hailed from the land of Uz, and Jemimah means “day.”

Even though her father’s name was not Job but Baruch Loew, the latter was a passable counterpart to that paragon of patience in his time of trouble. On the subject of Jemimah’s mother, I would rather not say anything.

Nor will I enlarge upon the squalor I saw in house number 533 in the Jewish quarter when I went there for the first time after making the acquaintance of the daughter of the house. I craftily pawned my watch there even though I had a new, not inconsiderable personal allowance in my pocket. And what I smelt in that house was almost worse than what I saw.

But a spell had been put on me, and it was a powerful spell and was destined to become a dark spell. How could it be otherwise when, forty years later, in that elegant, peaceful and spotlessly clean Berlin home, all it took was a garland of elderflowers, worn by a young girl at a dance, to bring it all back to me again?

* * *

Proceed to part 3...

Copyright © 1863 by Wilhelm Raabe
Translation copyright © 2023 by Michael E. Wooff